Monthly Archives: May 2008

7iDigital has been working to offer very affordable low-cost consumer electronics: Laptops, Mobile Phones, and Digital Cameras — starting with laptops in the very near future. With healthy specifications, and price starting under $250, they can meet the need of a wide range of students, professionals, and businesses.

Here’s the key message from 7iDigital:

“We believe the cost of mobile/ notebook computing is way too prohibitive and that today’s market leaders are just not capable of offering low cost laptops, even if they wanted to do it, because of their heavy fixed and operating costs, along with millions of dollars that they must spend on advertising to stay alive — all of which you have to pay for when you buy your laptop!

And on the other side, we are also seeing some innovative models coming up, which are priced under $400, but they often lack something useful/critical – a good hard drive, a dvd player, or a good battery pack. With millions of new Internet users every year, there is no reason why we should not have a low cost laptops that can also do all the basic professional work.

And we have been thinking about this for a while now, and decided to use our collective technology and business expertise to come up with quality laptops that are still very low cost. We plan to do this by having a minimum fixed cost base and will let our satisfied customers advertise for us and pass the savings to them. “

You can sign-up at www.7iDigital.com to receive more info and updates by email. Based on info that can be shared as of now, the laptops will be first launched in India in the very near future, and then they will also start becoming available for shipment in Europe and North America.

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Just last week, there was a news report of Intel planning to launch sub-$300 laptop, though no timeframe was given. Intel, the leading chip maker, is right in its market assessment. Over the last two years, the growth rates of notebooks have overtaken that of the desktops.

One of the most frequent questions has been: “What are the specs for your laptops? What all can one do with them?”

Here’s the Answer: We are committed to bringing good quality laptops at affordable prices, but we will not offer weak specs like some companies are doing. For example, bringing models with prices like Rs 14,500 etc but some of them are not even fully functional with just 128 MB RAM and 2-3GB Hard Drive – you can’t do much with those specs!

When we say low cost laptops, we are not aiming to cut corners on essential capabilities. We want to address the need for a functional laptop at low cost that will support the full range normal home usage – e.g. Internet, email, audio-video playback, office applications, document editing etc.

While our focus is to offer affordable low cost laptops, we also want to offer a couple of high performance models that can be used for computing intensive works like software development, gaming, etc.

Our laptops will support two operating systems: Microsoft Windows and Linux — our customers can choose. We are bound by business agreements not to share details till end-June.

We believe many of our buyers will are located outside India and they would like to buy a laptop for their family members in India. Reputation is important to us and we will not offer you something that we would not buy for our own family members.

Well, that’s all for now. We will share more updates about the planned notebook models soon.

Here’s an interesting post from the archives of E-Business history.May 1, 2001 – as reported by BBC.
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1306034.stm

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